The Third Mind, William Burroughs called it, in reference to his collaborations with Brion Gysin. It’s what happens when two people work together and an intangible something happens that creates an experience that neither could have had individually.

David Byrne and Brian Eno conjured previously undreamed of music in the form of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by surrendering to the magic of collaboration. Comics are all about the potential of such alchemy: witness Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s extraordinary Elektra: Assassin for just one stunning example. Not that partnerships always bear healthy fruit: Russell Brand has just lost his Radio 2 gig following his sparring with Jonathan Ross. And who knows what sick chemistry urged Fred and Rosemary West to egg each other on?

I’m pondering this having spent a delightful afternoon collaborating with Stephen ‘Scotty’ Clark on a horror screenplay. The basic concept is his, and he asked me to join him in realising it. Until today we’d worked on the story separately, but earlier we joined up for something like four hours of sparky generative play. A tremendous experience, in which we mapped out the first half hour of our story in considerable detail.

What makes our collaboration work? Mutual respect, for one thing. And a willingness to let the story come first, regardless of individual egos. The whole experience was characterised by fun: a lot of the time we were laughing out loud, and we’ve got an ability to extract the useful core of what each other is saying and add to that to make it even better. I found that I did a lot of pacing about as I held forth, while Scotty was the one who sat down and made the notes: this demarcation is one familiar in many comedy writing partnerships.

Something about it all is akin to improvisation in the Keith Johnstone sense: in his book Impro, Keith suggests that one great way to keep ideas flowing is to agree to what the other person just said and add to it. That was pretty much the operating procedure me and Scotty have, though we’re also comfortable enough with each other and our mutual goal to shoot down something the other has said and propose something hopefully better still.

Quite how it will pan out by the time we get to actually writing the screenplay I’m not sure. Will it work better if we write together and shape each word as a team? I’m not at all sure, though I’m willing to give it a go. At the moment the whole thing is a thoroughly enjoyable novelty that’s taking us both somewhere that we wouldn’t have reached individually. Characters are taking on forms that neither of us could have anticipated, which in turn shapes the dynamic of scenes, while still staying within the overall shape we have for the story.

One thing we were both intuitively sharp about is the desire to end on a high rather than ride the wave until it crashed. After four hours, we’d accomplished loads, and could have gone on to do more — but instead left at what we both felt was a useful resting point, that we can return to when we next get the chance to hook up. Oh, and if anyone wants to buy a laser that’ll do a display to make you the envy of your neighbours this Bonfire Night, get in touch: Scotty’s got one going for £600. You know it makes sense, and it’ll keep the pair of us in quality coffee for a while longer.

Well now, that was fun. Had an enjoyable and useful visit to London, primarily to pitch The Sharp End at Pitch Up 2008, an event organised by The Stellar Network at Channel 4. It was also an opportunity to do some more low key pre-pitch presentations of a couple of animation projects I’m developing with Andy Tudor and Corrina Rothwell.

It has to be said, when I found out that my Stellar pitch would be for just 30-60 seconds, I was not entirely happy. But when I relaxed I could again see the good aspects of it all, which were realised last night. Like, they’d whittled over 200 entries down into just 20 winners, and I was the only drama project to make it to the final. I’d explained to the organisers that I would be getting a train back home later that night, and they put me first to accommodate that need. I was fine with that, and had rehearsed my pitch pretty well by the time it came to stand and deliver. It went something like this — I didn’t want to be stiff and word perfect, but to hit the three key beats the pitch contains:

‘What if Shameless tackled the social problems of the Chatsworth Estate more realistically? If it did, you’d have to look at the issue of drugs in the area. And that’s what my series The Sharp End is all about: it’s a rounded look at drugs in modern Britain with drugs workers as its protagonists. And I’m the ideal person to write it because I spend some of my week working in a hostel with people who have substance issues.’

It worked well. The two judges latched onto the idea that The Sharp End is a post-watershed drama series since that was one of the things implicit in the Shameless comparison. And they really liked the fact that this is a world I know about through first hand experience (for clarity’s sake I slightly distorted the reality of the work I do at the hostel: not all of its residents have substance issues, but that was too pernickety a concept to put across in 30 seconds).

The judges — Sarah Edwards, Head of Entertainment Development at Talkback Thames and freelance development executive Madeleine Knight — asked some good questions in the few minutes of feedback that followed and I responded with something resembling credibility, and that was that. Went down well, and thankfully I managed to stay for the remainder of the event and still have enough time to get my train home. There should have been a third judge, and in a weird way it’s good that he wasn’t there, because the upshot of talking with one of the Stellar Network’s organisers was that they’ll get my whole package for The Sharp End to a leading drama name at Talkback Thames, including an extensive pitch document and full one hour script. Result.

It was instructive listening to the other pitches, both from the point of view of what people said and how they said it. For reasons of confidentiality I’ll not go into the content of those other pitches, except to say I’d have happily watched the majority of shows that were being proposed, ranging from a profile of someone you’ve heard of but won’t have seen on screen, to socially motivated documentaries about issues of international relevance, to entertainingly packaged lifestyle shows. As for the ‘how’ of it all, I felt I was one of the more coherent pitchers, if not as polished as a few of the people there, who had charisma as well as strong and readily understood concepts.

Between that and my lunchtime session to present my animation concepts — a chance to catch up with an old friend who introduced me to a new one, an animator turned screenwriter — and the opportunity that meeting presented to hook up with a big name in childrens’ broadcasting, it was an enjoyable and productive day that’s helped move my plans on in useful ways. Which is the way it should be: the prospect of ’success’ in this game is slender, so the least you can hope for while arranging everything to increase your chances is that the journey is fun.

Wow. As critical responses go it’s not very informative, but that was how I felt after reading Warren Ellis’s Aetheric Mechanics at a favourite cafe. In just 48 pages, with excellent artwork by Gianluca Pagliarani, he sets up a world derived from various old pulp traditions in which Sherlock Holmes analog Sax Raker investigates what he calls ‘the case of the man who wasn’t there’. He is accompanied in this venture by Doctor Richard Watcham, newly returned from the British Empire’s frontier in space, to discover that the Ruritanian air force is menacing London.

So far, so what? Steampunk yarns are nothing new, and often tiresome, more an outdated fashion statement than anything of substance. What makes this one unusual is the sheer craft that writer and artist put into the story. Every panel and every word count for something in creating the world and the plot that unfolds in it. Every detail has some significance, whether the patterns of smoke made by the Navy’s flying platforms indicating that they’re propelled by something like a helicopter blade; the potential meaning of the shift to the story’s narration by Watcham, recording the latest of Raker’s adventures; the imagination displayed in the realisation of this alternative London.

Ellis can sometimes be said to talk a better story than he writes, but on this occasion he’s disciplined and focused to excellent effect. The reason for this may be that Aetheric Mechanics is one of the latest batch of titles for Apparat, a line of comics from Avatar allowing Ellis to create works that aren’t in line with the established history of comics, but instead are inspired by whatever pulp tangents take his fancy. In this instance, he’s inspired — as Michael Moorcock and Christopher Priest have been in different ways in prose — by an imagined continuation of what H.G. Wells and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were getting up to in their fictions. Add a dash of Jules Verne, a touch of The Prisoner of Zenda, and you’ve got most of the ingredients necessary for Ellis to have conjured Aetheric Mechanics.

There’s one other necessary ingredient too: the large Hadron collider, which featured recently in popular consciousness as a potential bringer about of the end of the world. It plays a similar role here, but I don’t want to spoil exactly how this piece of thoroughly modern science interacts with the fantastic world conjured by Ellis and his artistic collaborator.

This is a work of two equal talents. Ellis has constructed an immaculately tight ‘graphic novella’ (his term) and Pagliarani has brought it to convincing life. The opening sequence of troops returning to the Royal Albert Docks from the war in space is masterfully realised, and the same goes for everything else Ellis gets him to draw. Early alternative technologies look credible, and even more importantly so do the characters that this story is peopled with.

For all the cleverness of concept and elegance of structure, this is a story that relies on readers believing in what’s happening to the characters, and the art is more than up to the challenge. Ellis is an established name already, and I’d like to think he’ll do more work of this originality alongside his higher profile gigs for Marvel. And, on the evidence seen here, I’m sure this is just the start of what will hopefully be a long and fruitful career for Pagliarani.

The thing is, I’m not much of a fan of romcoms. Not that I’m down on romance, but it’s a genre I find particularly tired, with a few laudable exceptions. Also, Ricky Gervais is someone who rates pretty high on my punchability scale, unsure whether his smugness is sincere or a joke and not liking what that tells me either way. Plus, he’s just gone on record as saying there hasn’t been a decent British film made since 1950, a statement that demonstrates a certain cockishness.

Put all that together, and it would seem that I’m unlikely to be in the target demographic for Ghost Town. So, it’s with some surprise that I’m here to tell you that it’s a very good film. Not earth shattering in any particular way, but a solid comedy proposition that has a curiously timeless appeal. I can easily imagine a version of it with James Stewart in the role that Gervais takes, as misanthropic dentist Bertram Pincus, whose heart slowly defrosts over the course of the story as one woman in particular helps warm him to people in general.

There’s a delightful supernatural element to this tale which gives the film its title. Pincus has a minor operation and technically dies during it for a few minutes. When he comes to, he can see ghosts. A city full of them, all wanting some of his time and attention so he can help them resolve whatever issues are keeping them earthbound. Not an original conceit admittedly, but as ever with these things it’s all about the execution, and the script — by the film’s director David Koepp and John Kamps — wrings maximum humour and emotion out of the idea.

Gervais is on strong form, his timing and physicality breathing convincing life into the emotionally dead dentist. Much of the story concerns the attempt by one particular ghost to shoo an insufferably pompous do-gooder away from his widow and into Pincus’s own arms. That leads to dentistry forming an important part of the plot and is a valuable reminder of the role of career as a metaphor for character. The knowledge that Pincus has helps him form a bond with the archaeologist widow as he identifies a mummy’s cause of death, and as that rapport grows it leads to the film’s conclusion when Pincus tells her that he can help her laugh again, this time with emotional resonance as well as reference to dentistry.

So far so cute, and it could be said that the film does tie everything up a bit too neatly. But why not enjoy that sensation? This is a story that’s all about closure, so it makes sense that technically it will demonstrate some proficiency in that regard.

Gervais is ably supported by his fellow actors, both in the main roles, and in minor supporting parts — whoever was doing casting had a lot of fun allocating roles to the ghosts who follow Pincus round in a pack. It’s skilful feelgood entertainment of pretty high calibre, and even if it doesn’t compare to some of Britain’s best films since 1950, Gervais has every reason to feel proud of his starring role in this better than mainstream American venture.

Like many an adolescent boy, I was attracted by the books of Robert E. Howard. His brand of fantasy is best experienced in the black and white world of your teens, when the notion of stultefying evil represented by institutions such as schools seems more true to life, and when the desire to put the world to rights is strong.

More than any of his other writings, Howard’s Conan stories continue to resonate with audiences, tales of the barbarian who becomes a king popular with every new batch of 14 year old boys. Naturally, there’ve been comic and screen versions of Conan. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that macho director John Milius was attracted to making a movie of the barbarian’s adventures, co-writing the script with the equally manly Oliver Stone.

At the start of the film, Conan’s parents are slaughtered by sinister followers of a snake cult, which saves the story from being burdened with tales of family dispute. He’s taken away and tethered to a huge wooden wheel that he has to push around for no identifiable purpose, and some years of doing this builds him up until he has the body — and sadly acting skills — of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Every fantasy epic needs a larger than life villain, and Conan’s enemy is deadly serpent cultist Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones). One of Thulsa’s better lines (relatively speaking) is ‘What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?’, and that gives you some pointers to the dodgy politics of the film and genre. Some of the time you’re distracted from them by images such as Conan seizing a vulture with his teeth that pecks at him as he’s tied to a tree, or a magician painting the barbarian with runes to save his life after he’s taken down from it, but the might is right notion that’s at the heart of the genre keeps resurfacing.

There’s a new movie version of Conan in the offing, but what I’d be far more interested in is a film take on the extraordinary Norman Spinrad novel The Iron Dream. That book stopped me in my tracks and prevented me from getting any more enjoyment from much mainstream fantasy fiction. It consists of a heroic fantasy yarn allegedly written by an alternate world Adolf Hitler, followed by an equally dubious scholarly paper exploring the fascist politics implicit in the text’s imagery and plot. Now there’s a way to spoil someone’s innocent adolescent fun. Between The Iron Dream and a sociology lecturer at first year in university, who compared me to a concentration camp guard (his idea of provocative play with new students), I was losing all my enthusiasm for fascism.

Oh for a fantasy film that explores an anarchist utopia: that’d be far more interesting than yet another tale of kings and queens and their subjects. And how about the same in our science fiction? Star Trek is essentially American foreign policy conducted in outer space: what if the Enterprise was run along syndicalist lines instead of having the usual military hierarchy that these tales always do? Only the film of Starship Troopers dared send up the fascism inherent in its source material, and even then a lot of the audience didn’t get it. Same applied to The Iron Dream, some of whose readers complained about the stuff about Nazis interrupting their daily dose of heroic fiction.

I had high hopes for 36. A French crime thriller directed by Olivier Marchal, touted as the gallic Heat, and starring Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu, all the signs were that this would be a policier of distinction. And for a while it did a good job of pulling me in, with a strong opening sequence in which distinguishing the cops from the bad guys is made intentionally difficult.

So far so good. Sad to say then, that as the film went on it reminded me less of epic Michael Mann size cinema than a bloated version of a tv cop show. The prime culprit is the dialogue, which is appallingly on the nose much of the time. Characters come on, tell you what they think and feel and why they are motivated to be that way, and exit having imparted their plot point. The most egregious example is the dismal line ‘Putting Leo behind bars won’t make you dream again Denis’. Admittedly this is subtitled, but I can’t think of any variation on that theme that would make the translation less painful. Plus, the sentiment is just way off for a tale of badass cops. Putting people behind bars is par for the course in such tales, but one reason it’s not typically done is to restore the fantasising capabilities of those locking them away.

It all falls sadly short, not just of Michael Mann’s majestic Heat, but also of quality police tv dramas such as The Shield. Those French cops think they’re bad muthas, strutting about in their black leather jackets, but Vic Mackey and his crew could eat them for breakfast without need of a glass of pastis to wash them down.

36 is the antithesis of a film that I keep coming back to, Sexy Beast. The latter’s script is all allusion and subtext, a twisted love story about the relationship of two gangsters where one man is content to put his past behind him and enjoy the present, and the other is a seething mass of emotions he can’t control and that lead him to appalling violence. One hasn’t got much to say, the other can’t say it. Compare to the eloquent detectives of 36, who tell you exactly why they’re doing things as they’re doing them, just in case there was any room for doubt in your mind. The thing being, there should be doubt. Nobody truly knows why they’re doing what they do, and — in screenplays at least — the more conflict there is between action, emotion, and self-image the better.

On paper, 36 does everything right, what with conflicting characters who end up on opposite sides, one ascending to leadership, the other plummeting to jail for his actions, and compelled to act against the former when he ends up being responsible for the death of the latter’s wife. That should be the stuff of big emotions, but because the characters insist on explaining their feelings and what they’re going to do as a consequence of them, it all comes across like a soap opera. A real waste of some real acting talent, and a clear case of a script that needed substantial development: the plot beats are fine, but the dialogue strips the story of any emotional power. And the responsibility for that lies in director Marchal’s hands, since he was responsible for the screenplay, after working with some other writers on the story itself.

In a scenario akin to a low budget Brit version of the Ocean’s N films (where N>11), I have somehow managed to get involved in a bit of hustling thanks to the Stellar Network. A week from today, I will be pitching a drama series concept to an audience of indie production companies, which I believe will happen down at Channel 4.

Needless to say, this is quite the opportunity. I thought at first I’d won it as a loyalty bonus for drinking reassuringly expensive continental lager in my boozing days, then recalled that I’d entered a competition forwarded by friend G, revolving around sending in a 100 word pitch for a new tv concept. Hadn’t got a 100 word one to hand for the project in mind, but I had done 50 and 500 word versions of same, so it was a question of doing a bit of a nip and tuck on them.

It is all rather exciting, but blocked up by a cold as I am, and whelmed if not overwhelmed by a number of writing projects, I have not yet got all fizzy about it. Friend S is offering to let me rehearse my pitching technique with him, which will be a novelty since I’m not at all sure I have a pitching technique. But it’s a generous offer, and I’ll take him up on it, opportunities like this being few and far between.

The project I’m pitching is my drug worker series, and S has been urging me to use certain buzzwords about it. So if I start referring to The Sharp End as an opportunity for a production company to consolidate its interests with a flagship state of the nation drama begging the question what if the Chatsworth Estate in Shameless were to have its drug issues addressed seriously rather than in essentially comedic form, you’ll know I’ve taken S’s coaching seriously.

Interestingly, friend A will also be in London on the same day for a conference on drugs. The lovely A is one of The Sharp End’s inspirations, a Yorkshire-based drug worker whose passion and experience was one of the starting points for this drama, and who helped me with an extensive research process that inspired much of the action and dynamics of the writing. With any luck, we’ll get together in the evening and give this excellent and inexpensive Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden my second visit in a month.

I hope things work out with The Sharp End. Certainly, the industry response so far has been favourable. My intention is to be its show-runner rather than to write it all myself, a proposition that I’m hoping will itself be appealing to some forward thinking production companies. And I have had some limited experience in this direction, having successfully steered a table of writers to getting more and better results than any of our peers in a workshop event at De Montfort University, an experience I thoroughly enjoyed.

Given the opportunity, I’d like to kickstart The Sharp End’s development process by pampering A and a couple of other drug worker friends in a spa for a weekend, and recording the stories they tell. It’s a rich world to work in, with a lot to understand for people new to it. As well as service user stories that are moving, funny, and tragic, there’s a big picture to comprehend about multi-agency working, the role of the NHS and other bodies in tackling drug use, and much more besides. I find it all fascinating, which is why I enjoyed writing the pilot episode so much, and why people are responding well to it.

So, wish me luck for next Monday, and I’ll keep you posted about what happens. Obviously my wish is for the series to actually reach the screen, since I’m more passionate about this than any other television project I’ve been involved with. But I’m realistic enough to know that its fate may instead be to serve as a calling card script that gets me work elsewhere, which may yet happen as a result of the impact it’s already made, and is one of my outcomes for next Monday. Watch this space…

Expectation is a prison. That being so, are you going to spend your time smoking dog-ends and trafficking phone cards, building matchstick pagodas, or maybe even working out how to escape? Having been awarded every gong going for No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers have brought us their new film, Burn After Reading.

There are artists in every field who reliably deliver just what their audiences want time after time. The Rolling Stones have been doing that for decades. And then there’s someone like Frank Zappa, who coached his band into doing a different show every night, and some of whose material emulated doo wop and blues without offering the emotional payoff that songs about being done wrong in love typically provide. For me, Zappa is much the more interesting artist, and in lieu of simplistic balms for the aches of life you get a wealth of intriguing musical experiments laced with a scabrous humour as identifiable as Frank’s moustache. And even dead, Zappa continues to be infinitely more interesting than the Stones, whose carcasses will probably strike E chords and pout when they’re six feet under.

Which brings us back to the new Coen brothers film. It starts off with a pull-in from space to the CIA headquarters, which any number of thrillers have made us aware are in Langley, Virginia. Accompanying the zoom is percussion-heavy synthesised music, the sort that you reliably get in techno-thrillers. All of which sets us up for Burn After Reading to be a sleek and shiny techno-thriller itself.

But of course, it isn’t. This is the Coens we’re talking about, and they have as much interest in delivering a mainstream action film as Zappa did in doing straight covers of Howling Wolf. What we get instead, is a potty-mouthed exploration of nothing in particular, as CIA agents and gym employees alike get involved in a hunt for a missing disk of computer data, and become all tangled up in each others’ lives as they do.

You’ll know already if that’s something you might find entertaining in the hands of Joel and Ethan Coen. If it’s not…well, you’ll get mighty frustrated waiting for global conspiracies and climactic action scenes, because as much as the photography and music cues you to expect them, they ain’t coming.

So, have the Coens set out to piss their audience off? Well, depends how you look at it. Their fascination this time round is with conjuring a film in which there’s not a whole lot at stake. And that’s not playing fair, basically. The fact that the likes of George Clooney and John Malkovich and Brad Pitt are involved in this unwinding yarn, and that their characters are just as convinced as the audience that Something Big is round the corner, just goes to show how dumb people are waiting for Significant Moments to appear when they could be just enjoying what’s happening right now for the sheer hell of it. A few moments of poignancy within the film indicate that this was indeed a possibility for its characters, one they’ve overlooked in favour of shooting for the moon.

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire the sheer cojones of the brothers for foisting a film like this on audiences when any number of strategists would have been telling them to follow up No Country For Old Men with something pretty much in the same vein. But that’s not the way the Coens roll, and is just another reason I’ll continue to follow their wayward path to see what captivates them next time round.

When was the last time you came across an artwork that made you reevaluate the medium itself? Two come to mind: DJ Shadow’s debut Endtroducing, a piece of music made almost entirely from other pieces of music, and Hell by the Chapman Brothers, an art installation made of 5000 mutated toy soldiers in a grotesque scenario that has special resonance for anyone who spent their teens playing wargames.

Comics though? Well, we all know about Watchmen and the fancy pants artwork of the likes of Dave McKean, but those are pretty much more sophisticated versions of what was happening in the medium already. What Jonathan Hickman has done with The Nightly News is something else again.

Not the least of Hickman’s accomplishments is that his graphic novel is eminently readable by people with no previous experience of comics. In some respects The Nightly News will go down better with a general audience than those whose perceptions are blinkered by what passes for mainstream in the comics medium.

It’s a grown-up satire about the media that will go down well with fans of Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk, and Bill Hicks. That fact alone distinguishes it from the great majority of what you’ll find in a comics shop. And even better, it does so in bravura style, in the process serving up a new take on what can be done with the comics page that leaves pretty much everything else years behind.

Jonathan Hickman is the sole creator of The Nightly News, and it couldn’t have worked any other way. What’s immediately apparent is that his vision of what to do with a page is light years away from the usual illustrative paradigms, whether skilfully rendered muscle men, or sketchy indie charity cases. Instead, his starting point is design: smart, clear, and contemporary.

Sure, there’s room for illustration in Hickman’s take on comics — the story features a range of well-depicted characters — but the first thing you notice is that the page looks more akin to a piece of clever infographics, the sort of thing that newspapers put together to explain the credit crunch or the collapse of Madonna’s wedding. His skill at guiding your eye across the page is considerable, which is more than can be said for some of the hotshot artists working for Marvel and DC.

For all that design finesse, you’re constantly captivated by a thoroughly engaging story about a cult intent on killing journalists for their part in messing the world up. Part of the fun is Hickman’s sheer gung-ho delight in his conceit: there’s real zest in his depiction of the slaughter of an assortment of hacks and anchors, and you can’t help but be captivated by the easy appeal of the cult that’s targetting them. The simplicity of the cult’s worldview is part of its attraction in a world where the media is in so many ways complicit with the corruption it reports on. In the age of the citizen journalist, we are all embedded — and the cultists are doing something definitive about that.

Sure, it’s nonsense. But it’s intelligent, skilfully perpetrated nonsense of a very high calibre. The fact that it redefines what a whole artform is capable of in the process is almost incidental. I have high hopes for the future work of Jonathan Hickman. Sad then, that he’s co-writing a series for Marvel with Brian Bendis. An inevitable career move in an industry where supporting yourself is hard, or a brazen sell-out that should be met with a hail of bullets? I’ll sleep on that one. For now.

Creativity is often thought of as a cerebral business. The artist seeks inspiration in solitude, and having pored over details of their life and connected them to the Great Themes of Art pours heart and soul into whatever their particular Thing is.

That model is fine as far as it goes, but overlooks a whole bunch of stuff. Like, creativity is a full-body sport. Don’t believe me? Try this, an experiment conducted on me by NLP trainer Dr Ron Perry a few months ago, whose expertise is in understanding how mind and body connect:

Ask yourself how inspired you feel, on a scale of 1-10.

Again, note how you represent your neck to yourself.

Whatever happened when you went through this process, something happened, right? And I’m willing to bet on the basis of my experience and seeing other people do this that you’ll feel a lot more inspired the other end of this process than you did at the start.

Hmm. Think about the word ‘inspiration’. The core of it has to do with breathing: respiration/inspiration, right? And the process you’ll have just gone through will have changed the way that you breathe. This is something I’ve noticed before now, too, either when I’m writing or about to write. And that’s the way it should be: the feeling of waiting in a queue and the feeling of being fired up to write a scene should not be the same. If the feeling was the same, how would you know which one to do?

So, there’s a whole set of physiological aspects to your state of creativity. And learning to recognise them, and nurture them, is one way to cultivate your creativity so that it happens when you want it to, and not out of the blue as if it’s something that just happens at random. It doesn’t, any more than you get sexually excited while you’re filling in a tax return. Certain patterns of breathing, of posture, of pace, go together better than others to help you accomplish particular tasks. And if your body is not your ally, then either you need to work with your physiology more empathically to achieve your aims, or learn to decode the signals your body is sending to address your physical needs.

Sort that stuff out, and the business of writing while you want to swim, or swimming when you want to write, will get cleared up. You’ll find yourself doing one or the other, and feeling good about it with a head uncluttered by regrets.

All of this is in the realm of what some people call ‘flow’. What it boils down to is this: the biggest variable in your performance from day to day is the state of consciousness you do stuff in. And the clearer and more honest you can be about your intentions, the easier it is for you to engage all your physical and unconscious resources in the service of your goals.